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Power blackout affects 12 million people in Pakistan

A row over unpaid bills sparked a huge power blackout in Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi, leaving most of its 12 million residents without electricity yesterday, officials said.

The outage came after Pakistan's main power utility accused the electricity company supplying the southern port of refusing to settle debts of more than half a million dollars.

It affected bazaars, businesses and homes in the normally bustling economic hub and caused huge traffic jams as signals went out of order, witnesses said.

"KESC [Karachi Electric Supply Co] owes 34.8 billion rupees [US$548 million] to us, which they have avoided paying for many months," said Tahir Bisharat Cheema, the director general of the supply and management wing of the country's Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA).

He said the company only repaid 250 million rupees despite weekly reminders "to which they never replied."

"We sent them a final reminder on Wednesday and informed them that we would stop supplying electricity if the longstanding dues were not paid," Cheema said.

Karachi has a history of frequent powercuts, but they usually only affect certain districts for a few hours at a time. Many businesses have generators, but private households rarely do.

"We have got a small generator for our house, but it has proved highly expensive today because we don't know when power is going to come back," said Gulzar Ahmed, who lives in the middle class Liaquatabad neighborhood.

The city's power company said supplies were returning to about a third of the city later yesterday, but it accused the national utility of failing to warn it about the shutoff.

"They suddenly stopped supplying 300 megawatts to Karachi at 8am and the power supply fell to virtually zero," KESC spokesman Sultan Hassan said.

"KESC staff are making efforts to restore electricity supply but it needs WAPDA supplies resumed first" he said.

Pakistan suffered major outages earlier this year, which authorities blamed on a lack of water for hydropower facilities.
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